I'm not usually one to advocate drones, but in this situation, drones!

Unarmed drones should be doing this sort of recon work - much better optics at night (and maybe during the day too). If they were solar powered or similar then they could be operated much longer and cover much larger areas.

I like where you're going with this but I think the drones should be armed. We're talking a wildlife refuge here, no one should be there with a gun, it's not a politically complicated and heavily populated region.

We have the technology to enforce entire areas of land as "you carry a gun here you get an EFP in the head".

Even factory new replacement AI-24 engines go for about 75% off out of Motor Sich in Ukraine. (not like they're selling to russia any more now are they?) and you can pick them up for around 50-100K in rostov.

I'm sorry but I really hate this misconception. Diamonds are not rare, that's true, but nobody is claiming they are to control the supply. Go into any jewellery store and I guarantee you that 90% of the stock will have diamonds.

The reason certain diamonds are so expensive is not the rock itself, but the way it is presented. Certain cuts can create better clarity, which makes the diamond prettier, which means that people will be willing to pay more for that diamond than they would, say, a poorly-cut diamond with no sparkle at all. Because people are willing to pay extra for a really nice diamond, the suppliers increase the price. This is basic supply and demand.

Also, yeah, diamonds in general are not rare - the lowest grade diamonds can be found in power tools and they really are a dime a dozen. The really nice diamonds though, the biggest diamonds with the fewest occlusions, are actually quite rare.

It's like if you baked a batch of cupcakes, and half of them turned out all misshapen and weird - all of the cupcakes are made from the same thing, but if you roll up at a bake sale and start selling those same cupcakes, people will pay more for the ones that look nice, and less for the lumpy ones.

hi there. i'm a white guy from america. i do conservation work in africa. let put this very simply to you. if a poacher finds you out and about they'll just kill you and whoever you're with because taking you prisoner is more work, restraining you is more work, and they can't just let you go bc you may alert others that they're there.

poachers are no different than terrorists other than you'll probably at least get a quick death - only so that they can be on their way sooner.

I can steal a bunch of money and get 15+ years of hard work worth of income too. Doesn't make it any less wrong or any more understandable than the people poaching just because their quality of life is less than others around the world.

I would totally read a book where they have an arrangement where they get paid per kill and then hire corrupt government officials to send prisoners out as fake poachers to be shot. Then maybe the officials get all clever and arrange something so that if there's anyone their superiors want "disappeared" (political rivals, etc), they dress them up as someone else and send them off to be executed that way without the public knowing. The whole scheme gets unraveled when the president of the country is disposed of that way in a military coup, but left in a way so that he would be identifiable so that the vice president, the real mastermind, is put in charge instead of the military that supposedly took control.

There is no moral lesson there or anything and it has zero plausibility in the real world, but it just sounds like it would be a really metal book. I also may have gotten slightly carried away to the point that any suspension of disbelief is lost because I'm slightly intoxicated and for some reason feel the need to say that in my comment. I hope I didn't spoil a plot twist.

We should probably find a species that we could train to guard the other animals. They'd need to be smart, fast and have some skill with their fingers/claws. Would be beneficial if they worked well as a team and if they showed some aptitude for being stealthy they could move freely without spooking the other animals too much. Or we could send in Jeff Goldblum, I dunno

Immediately after the death of Nabire in 2015, her ovary with four oocytes was removed and transferred to a laboratory in Cremona, Italy. The laboratory was able to extract two egg cells and fertilise them. However, without consulting the Dvůr Králové Zoo the semen of a southern white rhino was used instead of a northern white rhino, which the zoo considers a wasted opportunity.

Things like this really leave me speechless. They had the two last egg cells of one of the last specimens, and without consideration fertilised them with the semen of another (sub-?)species which branched off a million years ago. Brutes.

why is fatally wounding in quotations? it makes it look like you are saying they are lying.

edit: I know it's a quote, but the entire title of the article is one continuous quote so either the entire thing should be in quotation marks or none of it should unless you were making a quotation inside a quotation which would use "" and then ''

well sure that's why quotation marks exist in general but in this case the entire title is the authors words so placing a portion in quotations is not typical. Unless you were making a quotation inside a quotation which would use "" and then ''

BBC do that a lot. I'm not sure exactly what their rules are around this (I think it's something to do with information that hasn't been independently confirmed yet), but more of their headlines than not have quote marks around the key information. Can sometimes look a bit strange.

Yeah poachers are bad, but they're often just heavily impoverished locals offered tons of money by worse folks, sudanese terrorists or asian black market traders. If you kill some more will replace them. You have to cut off the incentive. Posturing and bullshitting about "killing bad guys" etc is what got VETPAW thrown out of Tanzania I believe.

I agree that the incentive should be removed. In some places, they have made it to where the former poachers actually started to protect the animals because the animals are used as an attraction for tourism. This would work in some areas but in others, the poaching would continue. If the poachers want to play hardball and kill conservationists, then fire should be fought with fire.

I can definitely say this has worked in India. Today, we employ only officers in the forest service via a centralized exam and, employ local tribals for everything else, including jobs as drivers, guides, guards etc. Poaching has certainly gone down. Plus, for some reason, most of the forest service people I have met are enthusiastic, an anomaly in any bureaucracy. One guard I talked to was shot with an arrow that went through his stomach while on duty. He was back on duty in a month, bandages and all and he didn't really have to worry about losing his job. Another officer I met was kind of a psycho(He would shoot poachers/tree smugglers on sight, armed or not, then go back to collect their partially eaten bodies a few days later, claiming they were victims of animal attacks) but, it's odd seeing someone put their job and liberty on the line for nothing other than love of animals. Also, one of the most successful poachers in the Sunderbans, with a kill count of over a hundred tigers across India and Bangladesh just walked into the local Forest office and surrendered one day, giving up the names of all his contacts, allowing the police to dismantle the smuggling operation to China temporarily. Now, he is a Forest Guard and the one who guides boats with VIPs on them.

Nope, local morgue was too far, about a hundred kilometers to the nearest district town. Plus, these morgues are typically overworked, with one town serving an entire district(A fuckton of area) Give them a decomposed body a few weeks old, they're taking the investigating officer's word on it.

Acctually, in places that is already the case, if you see someone armed in a nature preserve in South Africa, you can shoot to kill on sight.

Learned that on Nitro Circus last night.

EDIT: If you have a permit to be there for a legitimate reason, like conservation or safari, and aren't poaching, you can carry guns, and kill anyone who is armed and isn't supposed to be there, I assume there are protocols for figuring out who is supposed to be there or not.

Just a question, so you are shooting someone in a nature preserve with what exactly? Because if you say gun, they can kill you on the same grounds you are saying you can kill them. Because you are in fact, an armed person.... in a nature preserve at that point.

They need to dump purple dye on them. The kind used for bank robberies. But the quantity of those buckets used for firefighting. Then offer rewards for the arrest of any purple fucks wandering around local towns.

I knew Roger Gower about 10 years ago in Gainesville, FL. He was one of the bravest guys I knew when it came to approaching beautiful college girls at a bar. Certainly having a British accent and being a helicopter pilot never hurt his chances. RIP mate, hope there's plenty of birds to chat up whereever you are now.

Now that pisses me off. Those idiots attack a British helicopter and think that's a good idea?! This has ruffled my Murica feathers, the Brits are our allies and tea-sipping buddies and this bloke was just trying to keep some glorious animals alive. I say we send some backup...in the form of Apache gunships. Dammit now I'm drinking a cup of tea in his honor.

I'd like to weigh-in on a couple of myths that commonly come up in these threads:

There are a number of "shoot-to-kill" nations in Africa. Tanzania has been considering a "shoot-to-kill" policy off and on due to the violence used by the poachers in their country. Some nations have far fewer violent incidents with poachers, while countries like Democratic Republic of Congo and Central Africa Republic experience high levels of elephant poaching by rebel insurgents and militias.

There are many different types of poachers based on their motives and whether they make a career from poaching. Those organized into ivory-poaching syndicates are not the same caliber of people who are subsistence poaching bushmeat.

Poachers make very little off an individual wildlife kill compared to the market price often quoted by the media. The price of "raw ivory" is much lower than that of "worked ivory" bought by consumers. It's estimated that a poacher's net revenue is 5-10% (as little as $80 per kilogram), but can be higher for small poaching groups that are self-funding, rather than relying on funding from a syndicate or wildlife trafficking group.

In my opinion, all poachers should be shot on sight. They are just a bunch of murderous assholes who don't deserve the right to live. I wouldn't mind if they were maimed and mutilated before being killed. I just really want them to suffer for everything they do.